Infinite, Eternal, ever living Wisdom and Love; all that we know, and all that we know not, of Divinity is enshrined in eternity and in Thine own Infinite Being. Still we do ever seek to find at the soul's altar of Thy love and wisdom our chosen place; and we turn through the manifold revelations of Thy life, through those ways ineffable that Thou hast revealed within the soul, to find Thyself alone. Oh, God, may Thy children, although still immured in the senses, enwrapped in the feebleness of time and earthly existence, know the wondrous ways by which they are led, by which, through Thine Infinite law, Thou hast appointed worlds and systems to be governed. May they know that only by the light of the soul, only from Thy supreme and perfect altar, can they find the knowledge of Thy life; and thus may they find the knowledge of Thy love; thus may they turn, seeking ever the highest and the best, unto Thee, the only God.

Beloved ones, it is not intended through a feeble human organism, and to those immured in the earthly state, to give an entire statement of the vast Cycles by which God has made known His" truth to man; but when Truth is ready to be born whether in words or persons, it needs must come.

Unto the altar of that Love and Wisdom, whereunto your footsteps ever tum, when you seek the light, which is not a holiday journey, nor pleasure path, we again invite you, by whatever thorn-paths ye may have come to reach the shrine, through whatever ways of shadow, so that the altar is won that is all that is needed.

From knowledge to feebleness and ignorance, from power to weakness, is but the necessary reaction of the cycles which you 251 have heard were the beginnings of the Messianic Dispensations of the earth. Those cycles so vast in their beginnings, culminations and recessions that there could be no records to bear them forward in the history of man, but only tradition.

We find ourselves amid added lines of life, amid culminating and receding waves, amounting, almost, to a world's history; ever following the culminating waves, mounting to such immense heights, were their recession. So from the state of power and its decline to that which we now approach, were ebbing and flowing tides to the full recession.

In following the next period or step in the great Messianic Cycles, we must again leap over the centuries, must find ourselves following the receding dominion of that period of conquest and triumph over the earth of physical power and grandeur which in itself, unaccompanied by any spiritual purpose, would certainly be absorbing and seemingly potent; still the inherent weakness of mere physical victory brings a consciousness of its own destruction; for power wrested from the Earth must be again yielded back into her keeping. Nature has her mighty forces with which to conquer all that man can do that is not in the realm Divine.

Again a great cyclic epoch, another glacial period visited the Earth, sweeping from the North, from that far source of wondrous power which brought the first Messianic Cycle to the world; another period of partial destruction and partial creation, in which a portion of the central continent of Asia, all the western part of Asia, and a small portion of what might be termed Europe, was created. A part of the South American continent, divided from that to which it previously belonged, was united to the northern portion; and there rested in the eastern and western hemispheres two continents of about equal dimensions, but not in the geographical position where they now are found; much farther to the westward was that which you call the "American continent"; much farther eastward, from the westward side of the portion you call "Asia".

Two equal Kingdoms had sprung into these distant and widely separated portions of the land. Amid the destruction and confusion which grew from these great cataclysmic changes, there was left a small remnant of each of the various nations connected with the former kingdoms, forming as the new foundation, similar wonderful tribes to those your predecessors discovered in North and Central America. These "Aborigines," as they are erroneously called, are fragments which each period of false civilization leaves. While the great past civilizations are not borne forward by these fragments of tribes or nations, they are portions of what are to be taken up in succeeding Dispensations to be borne forward to culminations of civilization.

Thus, the Third Dispensation (which is like the sixth, in the fact that it is more important, and the ninth, when it comes, will be still more important, and the Twelfth Cycle which will be the culmination of all the Messianic Cycles of the world), is a distinct one, separate from the gross, degrading stages of power through the senses; separated also from the lifeless and soulless intellect which dominated in the Dispensation of Knowledge, separated by the recession from the Power, which under the dominion of conquest prevailed, and made up the mighty Second Dispensation.

You enter now a new atmosphere; the two preceding Cycles of the earth have yielded their harvests of physical and intellectual victory: the victories born of Knowledge and Power.

Reposing in the midst of the Eastern continent, as in the midst of the Western (eastern and western being only relative), were two fair kingdoms; in one of these were gathered up the broken threads of past knowledge, and they were placed in condition to be borne forward, reproducing in more perfect form, knowledge of the first dispensation (excepting that portion of knowledge which was the result of the race of angels), and reproducing also in primal perfection the power over the material elements.